Teacher-research for Difficult Circumstances: Learners as Resource

There may be a symbiotic, or at least 'necessary' relationship between teacher-research which is oriented towards exploration of learners' perceptions and engagement/development of learner autonomy.

Consulting learners as part of teacher-research has shown itself to be effective, in itself, in addressing classroom issues, for example in the Chilean Champion Teachers project (see Rebolledo, Smith & Bullock 2016), probably because pupils/students start to feel more involved in and responsible for classroom decision-making. This learner autonomy related principle ('engagement' of learner autonomy via input into classroom decisions) was explicitly built into teacher-research projects set up at a Hornby School on 'Learning in the low-resource classroom' in Kathmandu (November 2014),

Developmentof learner autonomy: activities which elicit student/pupil reflection on learning as part of teacher-research can be seen as valuable for developing learners' metacognition with regard to their own learning. Thus, learner autonomy is involved in the sense of development as well as engagement of learner autonomy. See Pinter, Mathew and Smith 2016 for some evidence this may be the case.

Engagementof learner autonomy via pedagogy of / for autonomy can be seen as an eminently appropriate approach in difficult circumstances (see Smith 2003 and Fonseka 2003, both in Palfreyman and Smith 2003). This is shown also in the work of Zakia Sarwar (Smith 2008) and Kuchah and Smith (2011).. See also Kuchah, Lamb and Smith (2014) AILA presentation; and historical work on Michael West. Engagement in such pedagogy may bring about particular needs for teacher-research, for the teacher to understand the changing classroom culture, i.e. the two may go hand in hand (cf. Smith 2003).